


we're all the death you need

by epistolic



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:30:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The next morning Will comes down the stairs to find a stag in the hall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're all the death you need

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Mehr Tod brauchst du nicht](https://archiveofourown.org/works/819718) by [eurydike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydike/pseuds/eurydike)



In his dream, Will Graham is walking along a deserted beach.

The sand is rough under his feet; the water, a silent ebb against the shore. There is no light, but this is a dreamscape that Will knows by heart – his father brought him here once, gave him his first taste of salt air, his first glimpse of the gulls wheeling above with their paddling red feet.

The last girl they found had been inside a bath-tub. Somebody had taken out her intestines. They had wound them out of her opened belly, coil upon gleaming coil, all six metres. Bobbing in the water.

Behind him, Will is aware of the sound of hooves.

\--

“You stated that you saw her,” Hannibal Lecter says, in his neat, clipped accent.

“I – ” 

Will stops, digs the heel of his hand into his eyes. It is nearly twelve. He is jittery and exhausted and he is sitting in Hannibal Lecter’s dining room in a shirt and a pair of sleeping shorts. Hannibal appears beside his elbow: slides, with an elegant motion, a cup of freshly-brewed coffee into his field of vision.

“I didn’t see her,” Will says at last. “I didn’t see her face. It wasn’t – it wasn’t important, you have to understand, it didn’t matter. But I knew it was her. I could sense it.”

Hannibal sits down opposite him. “Go on.”

“Her body brushed my foot. And when the tide came in, her guts, they – caught around my ankle.”

“You said her face wasn’t important.”

“No. And it isn’t. Wasn’t. I don’t know why.” He lets out a shaky breath. “I just _know_.”

Hannibal says nothing. The late hour doesn’t seem to have caught him off-guard. He sits, prim as ever, blue shirt crisp underneath his vest, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Steam from the coffee curls over his shoulder. Hannibal is unshakeable; you get the feeling that nothing in this world would surprise him. It is both reassuring and perplexing.

“You’re at liberty to tell me I’m certifiably insane,” Will says, finally, edgy from the quiet.

“Is that what you think you are?”

“I don’t know. Probably. This time, it was different. Unusual.”

“How so?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Try.”

“I can’t.” A quick, almost fearful dart of the eyes upward. “It’s late. I’m sorry, I just didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t stay at home.”

Hannibal watches him, silent, for a moment.

Then Hannibal inclines his head. “Of course. I understand completely, William. You are always welcome here, no matter the hour. I will have a bed made up for you in the guest room.” The edge of his lip turns up: Will’s hand is inching forward, brushing almost spasmodically over the saucer of the coffee cup. “Be careful, it is very hot.”

“I know.”

It is going on twelve-thirty. Hannibal seems to have sensed it is not the time for questions. Not yet. They sit at the dining table, Will hunched over a coffee he doesn’t want to drink, Hannibal smiling with just the corner of his mouth.

\--

The next morning Will comes down the stairs to find a stag in the hall.

It is a monstrous thing. It towers over him, its broad shoulders at the level of his head. Its cloven hooves have left muddy prints on Hannibal’s perfectly polished floor. 

Will thinks, with a distracted sort of hysteria: Hannibal will probably murder me for that.

This is the first time Will has looked the stag in the face. Mostly it follows him, sometimes silent, sometimes keen to be heard. On most days it is like a bad taste in the back of Will’s mouth. He’s learned to adapt around it, in the way that a motorist will navigate around a hole in the road, or a body in the street; but then, at times like this, it is rather difficult to ignore.

The stag’s eyes are large and dark, and they are vaguely familiar.

Hannibal’s voice comes from the direction of the kitchen. “William?”

He is rooted to the spot. Swallowing happens in slow motion, one muscle and then another. The stag’s antlers cast a hypnotic pattern on the tiles.

And then Hannibal himself appears, apron tied briskly around his waist. 

“William,” Hannibal says. “There you are. I thought I’d heard you come down.”

Will jolts back into himself. Memory, awareness. Sensory input. The light from the window blares at him abruptly with the force of a trumpet. He becomes aware of his body, the sweat that clings to his forehead and his neck, his armpits, the bite of the tile on his soles, the distant prick of pain in his palms.

Hannibal looks down instantly at his clenched fists. “You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

“You’re bleeding. You’ve cut yourself.”

“Oh,” Will says. And so he has. He holds out one hand, looks at it. Winces. “Oh, I must’ve – I don’t know how that happened.”

“Your nails,” Hannibal says. His gaze stays fixed for a moment before dragging back up to Will’s face. Hannibal’s own face is composed, as if people come into his house and bleed everywhere all the time. “Take yourself into the kitchen. I have a first aid kit in the bathroom, I’ll find you a bandage to cover it up.”

\--

Will Graham has total empathy, but it is not as broad a gift as you might expect.

He doesn’t see into everybody’s head. He doesn’t walk down the street and jump because, coming from the opposite direction, somebody is walking towards him and he sees himself from that person’s perspective. His gift is darting, needle-like, a burst of insight that fizzles until it flares.

He doesn’t travel in an infinite miasma of suppositions: his mind connects only when it wants to connect. When it sees a path of relatively limited resistance, down which his imagination can flow like water.

He can’t for example get into the mind of Alana Bloom. What drives her, what occupies her? He doesn’t know. Abigail, too, is a puzzle in which the pieces don’t dock, no matter how he shifts them in his hand, no matter how hard he wonders what it must be like to be her place. Hannibal had said, I have a knack for the monsters – and perhaps this is true also of Will Graham. He can only reach into the minds of the deranged.

Katz leans back from where she is braced over the dead girl’s body. “Neat cut, this.”

“It was done with a scalpel.” Will clears his throat, nervous. “Midline. You see the swerve of the cut, at the umbilicus?”

“So, what, we’re looking for a surgeon?”

“Maybe.”

He folds his arms defensively across his chest.

Not even Hannibal knows the truth about his dreams. Ordinary people – Alana, Jack – they assume he is afraid. They see his skittish eyes, the cold sweat that breaks over him. They hear the quiver in his voice.

But the split second before he wakes he is something else entirely: he hears his heartbeat as it thunders through his dreamscape, he tastes the bright copper of blood on his lip. He is taking great handfuls of a girl’s insides and pulling them out, fist by fist.

Just before he remembers who he is meant to be, he enjoys it.

\--

“I hope you have not yet had dinner,” Hannibal says.

The dogs crowd around them. Tails whip at their knees. Will is embarrassed for no good reason; he tries to take a step back, maybe to let Hannibal in, gets the prod of a wet nose instead at the back of his thigh.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. He tries not to imagine the disaster that will be Hannibal’s suit after Winston.

“There is no need to apologise,” Hannibal says. “I am fond of your dogs. And you made a house call yesterday, so I am merely returning the favour.” He looks down at one of the grocery bags dangling from his hand. “Though I’m afraid I forgot to bring a corkscrew for the wine.”

Hannibal says it like it is unforgiveable: however shall we manage without it, that kind of thing.

Will shuffles over to the side. “Well, I’m – come in.”

The inside of his house looks as if a hurricane has been through it. Sheet music scattered across the top of the piano; one shoe, not entirely clean, on the sofa; plus one of the dogs, probably Sheba, has pulled the cloth out from under a lamp in a corner of the living room.

Will feels his face heat up, remembering the gleaming granite of Hannibal’s counter-tops.

“I don’t know if I have a corkscrew lying about somewhere in the kitchen,” he says. “I think – ”

Hannibal nods towards the piano. “What were you playing?”

“Oh,” Will says. Fidgets. “Nothing, really.”

“I play a little, myself.”

“Do you?”

Hannibal sets one of the grocery bags down on Will’s dusty floor. His hand reaches out, runs up one octave of a D-flat minor scale with practised ease and then back down again.

“Music is one of my passions,” Hannibal states, still looking down at the keys. “I have a keen appreciation of anything that is beautiful. Anything that is balanced. Anything that is pleasing to the eye, to the ear, to the palate. Even the nuances of the human mind please me, although you might say that I should really know better, given my line of work.” He looks up, smiling slightly. “And given yours.”

Will lets out an incredulous laugh. “Oh, there’s _nothing_ pleasant about the human mind.”

“No? But it is so intricate. So delicate.”

“It’s also brutal,” Will points out. “The worst things that have ever happened to humankind have been self-inflicted.”

“Yes, but even that has its own poetry,” Hannibal says. “We are capable of simultaneously bringing both beauty and devastation to each other. We each have the capacity to create or destroy. We are, every one of us, a combination of opposing appetites – every one of us a hypocrite. Don’t you think?”

Something uneasy slithers down Will’s spine; he says nothing.

Hannibal straightens. It is a balanced movement, delicate, nuanced, pleasing to the eye.

“I’m feeling rather hungry,” Hannibal says. “Aren’t you?”

\--

“I think the murderer is a doctor,” Will says after dinner. He is watching Hannibal meticulously stir sugar into his instant coffee; three chinks of the spoon, like rattling dice. “A surgeon, probably.”

Hannibal sets the spoon down onto the chipped saucer. “Oh?”

“The incisions, they were all made cleanly, carefully. Very controlled. But the bowels, their – removal – not half so controlled. Something excited him, something caused him to forget himself. Victims were all alive when he made the cuts. Possibly he never meant to kill them. Possibly he was going to stitch them back up when he was done.”

“Well, people do have a nasty habit of dying once their intestines are gone,” Hannibal says.

“Maybe he only wanted a look. A peek inside.”

“I suppose.” Amusement pulls at Hannibal’s lip. “Interesting though, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“A surgeon. Whose one purpose in life is to preserve it, not end it. The irony of it will keep the papers going for weeks.” A measured sip of coffee; it is a credit to Hannibal’s remarkable restraint that no disgust at the taste mars his expression. “It would make a fascinating psychological profile, wouldn’t it?”

“You don’t have to drink that,” Will says. “I don’t even drink it myself.”

Hannibal smiles. “It’s fine. Every now and then, it is refreshing to experience something that one isn’t used to.”

\--

“Why are you even doing this?” Katz says.

Will looks over at her, surprised. She is elbow-deep in the dead girl’s abdomen – it seems a bizarre question to ask, given the situation. 

“What?” he says.

“This job. Why do you do it? You’re unstable, right? And going into the minds of nutcases makes it worse.” A wet, squelching sound. “I mean, I know Jack kind-of bullied you into it, but if you’d have said no then there wouldn’t have been much he could’ve done about it.”

“I think you underestimate the lengths to which Jack will go to get what he wants.”

“Nah.” Katz shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

This is always how Katz has been. Open. Unapologetic. Will has tried to get inside her head too, but she’s inaccessible; it’s like trying to get to Antarctica on foot.

“Why do _you_ do it?” he asks her after a pause. “Jack didn’t bully _you_ into it.”

“I do it because I want to do it, I’m not doing it for anyone else.”

“But _why_ do you want to do it?”

She shrugs. “Curiosity, I guess. Interest. We’re all fascinated by it, right? I mean, secretly? Somebody gets murdered and it’s all anybody can talk about for the next month. The more bloody, the more gruesome, the better. Everybody wants a photo or a blood-stained piece of the girl’s skirt. It’s what we are. We _like_ it.” She takes out her hands, snaps off the bloodied gloves. Lays them aside. “We’re all drawn to the grotesque; we’re all condemning it, but deep down, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all want to do it. That’s the truth. That’s what nobody wants to admit.” She looks up and raises a brow at him. “You want to come take a look at this, or what?”

He goes over to her. He takes a look. In the yellow kidney dish, from where Katz has fished it out of the dead girl’s body, is a surgical stitch.

\--

In his dream, Will Graham is walking alone along a deserted beach.

Behind him, the sound of hooves: _one, two, three_ , in time with the beat of his pulse. And then he realises that it _is_ the beat of his pulse, and nothing more. The breath of the stag is his breath. The shadow of the creature, as it stretches across the sand, blurs as if it is unsure of whom it really belongs to.

When he turns, he meets the stag’s eye: brown, bright, they are familiar because they are his own.

**Author's Note:**

> My first ever Hannibal fic! I have so many Feelings about this show, oh my God. All Of The Feelings. There will doubtless be more fics to come, but since I'm still relatively new to these characters, I hope I've gotten them down alright.
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


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